This review examines cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying social influence on autobiographical memory. We aim for this review to serve as a bridge between researchers who focus on veridicality (e.g., eyewitness memory) and those who give primacy to meaning, especially given the elusive nature of measuring veridicality in uncontrolled personal experiences. We assess whether mechanisms are similar for three aspects of memories, namely facts, interpretations, and autobiographical reasoning. We present a model of memory change in facts and interpretations that is incidental and time-bound, in contrast to change in autobiographical reasoning that is more deliberate and open to influence. We emphasize the empirical challenges of studying memory that is truly autobiographical alongside the compromise to experimental control required to answer certain questions. We finally argue that autobiographical memory represents a naturalistic domain where memory processes, reasoning processes, and conversational influences collide, with potential implications for applied research on veridicality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Impact Statement: Memory researchers have long understood that memories can be influenced by various social factors, including things said in conversations with others. The most prominent findings relate to eyewitness memory, when people include details from conversations after an event occurs that were not in their initial memory. In order to conduct these studies, researchers often achieve experimental control by showing all participants the same event, through videos or simulations, and take charge to introduce the false information themselves. This paradigm has been powerful in showing how memory can change, but we ask whether the findings from these studies can be applied to the strong emotions and confused conversations that often accompany highly salient personal experiences. We especially note that people often talk with others after important experiences, and so when researchers study personal experiences, or autobiographical memories, we lose the same experimental control of other studies. Our review may be especially relevant to considering eyewitnesses speaking with each other after an event, parents discussing events with their children, and cognitive interview techniques. In this review, we consider whether the cognitive and neural mechanisms used to understand social influences on memory can be applied to research on autobiographical memory. We divide autobiographical memories into three categories, facts, interpretations, and autobiographical reasoning, and review research on all three, considering how they are similar, different, and how they influence each other. While we conclude that many aspects of controlled memory studies can be applied to autobiographical memory, we argue that much more can still be learned from nonexperimental approaches that study memory in more naturalistic contexts, especially with regard to how these different components of autobiographical memory influence each other. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Grysman, Azriel, Christin Camia, and Monisha Pasupathi. Different Routes to Conversational Influences on Autobiographical Memory. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (Article published online February 13, 2023). https://psycnet.apa.org/search/display?id=e838e4c7-f259-c466-b40a-8839b8d54ac3&recordId=1&tab=PA&page=1&display=25&sort=PublicationYearMSSort%20desc,AuthorSort%20asc&sr=1

Azriel Grysman is a professor of Psychology at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit APA PsycNet's Website. https://psycnet.apa.org/search/display?id=e838e4c7-f259-c466-b40a-8839b8d54ac3&recordId=1&tab=PA&page=1&display=25&sort=PublicationYearMSSort%20desc,AuthorSort%20asc&sr=1